Like in any industry, programmers have tools. I always enjoy finding out what others use so here’s a collection of mine. I’ve limited my list to my most used ones. Drop me a line if you have any recommendations!

Whether it is in the field of accounting, journalism, writing or teaching, freelancers have managed to get hired and at the same time link with the millions of other professionals in their area of expertise.

Contracting work out to a freelance web developer or programmer is a great way to complete technical work without taking on the resources and commitment of hiring a new employee. It also means you can work with an expert who has lots of relevant experience and expertise, and who would be hard to recruit and expensive to retain.

We’ve been putting an Apple Watch extension to an existing app and it’s been great fun! We were hitting some issues getting going with it in Rubymotion. I thought I’d start to document our findings and hopefully that’ll help others.

For a recent project, we wanted to send a daily email with the recent changes to certain records. It was wanted by email so that they had an email trail of all changes of interest. It could have been a full blown web based thing but this gave us the opportunity to keep it simple.

We’ve been working on a video app for a client of ours. We came across the need to select videos from the iOS camera roll/photo album. It was one of those trial and error type (-frustrating) endeavours. We thought we’d write down our findings in the hope of saving someone else from the same frustration.

ActiveJob was introduced into Rails 4 to handle slower tasks that don’t want to hold up the web server. This functionality is available in older Rails versions although through non-core gems. I wanted to write up a quick guide to getting it running with Sidekiq on Heroku.

I often use the rack-mini-profiler gem while developing my Rails applications. It’s a ruby gem which provides information in-page about the speed of processing the request. It shows the number of queries and what parts of your code take the longest. I like running it in my dev environment as it helps me to quickly review the performance of each page.

Over my career as a web developer, I have unsurprisingly worked with PHP quite a bit and used my fair share of PHP frameworks. I’ve developed custom PHP apps, large scale Drupal products and I’ve configured and customised WordPress blogs.

I needed to display a notification on Android devices pushed from a Rails server for a particular app. There’s lots of documentation about it but there’s almost too much. I thought I’d summarise it for this specific purpose here.

I’ve been using RubyMotion recently to build an iOS app for a client. It’s really good fun! It turns out that there’s an easy way to perform actions, such as saving, when toggling a switch in RubyMotion. I’m using Formotion but the same approach should work without it.

For my first year being full time self-employed (2013), I worked in what is essentially the spare room. It was perfectly fine for the time. But towards the end of the year, I started to want to have my own space. The ease at which I was getting distracted made me want a separate and dedicated space. I also wanted separation in order for my business to have a little more of its own identity.